OpenOffice.org Developer Article Contest

Contest Overview

OpenOffice.org Developer Article Contest

Dear developers and technical writers,

The contest has now run for six months and we are taking a break. There have been fewer articles coming in and we need to think of other ways to excite interest in the contest--or at least in writing articles for developers.

We thank all those who have submitted articles. We also congratulate those who have won: their articles are making it easier for developers to work on OpenOffice.org.

And we want to underscore that merely because the contest is on hold for now, our desire for good developer articles remains strong. Help your fellow OpenOffice.org being and send us articles!

What can be won?

What criteria do articles have to meet to get accepted?

A submitted article has to have at least 1,200 words (about three pages
of text) excluding embedded source code snippets and screenshots.
Only articles written in English can be accepted. However, teams
can submit articles together, so that one developer can create the
content and someone else can translate it to English.
Submissions have to be sent as attachments in the OASIS OpenDocument file format
to the mailing list
contest@development.openoffice.org on or before the
submission deadline date. Only content that has been created
AFTER the start date of the contest can be submitted, e.g.
old articles and blog entries cannot be used.
Finally, developers who want to participate in the contest have to
be o.k. with the licensing terms of the
JCA and PDL since
the article content will be published on OpenOffice.org under these terms.

What criteria will be used to choose a winner?

There will be no 100% scientific and measurable criteria. Instead,
the selection committee will choose a winner based on their
preferences. Nevertheless, the following criteria will influence
the chances of winning:

relevance to developers

existing and urgent gaps

"cool stuff"

amount of sample code

comprehensibility

length (not too long, not too short)

illustrations (screenshots, diagrams)

enables new developers

etc. etc. etc.

For entering the contest it does not matter what tools (e.g. NetBeans, Eclipse,
Microsoft Visual Studio, Borland Delphi, etc.) or programming languages
(e.g. C++, Java, Python, Perl, etc.) are used. However, a broad availability
to the technologies will increase the attractiveness of a submission article
since more developers will be able to take advantage of the article content.

What will be done with the articles?

Every month a committee will pick the best article from the pool of
articles. Articles which did not win initially, will stay in the pool,
so that they can still win in subsequent months.

ALL submitted articles will get published no matter if they have already
won or not. Once the deadline has been reached, all articles submitted
in that period will get published to wiki.services.openoffice.org under
the PDL and the JCA, so that developers will immediately be able to
benefit from the submitted content. Nevertheless, the selection committee
will make its decisions based on the original content submitted to the
submission mailing list.

Authors will still be allowed to use the article content somewhere else,
e.g. for a magazine, book or personal web site. If you have a publication
in mind, please check with the publisher upfront whether they will
still accept an already published article or not.

Who can participate?

Everybody who is not a member of the selection committee can
participate in the contest. If someone wins in one period he/she has
to stay out of the contest for the following three periods.

Who is running the contest?

OpenOffice.org with the support of Team OpenOffice.org e.V. and
extra sponsorship from Sun Microsystems are running the Developer
Article Contest.

Who is in the selection committee?

The selection committee consists of at least 10 and no more
than 15 people. Initially, the following people will be in the
selection committee:

Jürgen Schmidt

Stephan Bergmann

Andreas Schlüns

Carsten Driesner

Pavel Janík

Kurt Cagle

Kay Ramme

Michael Meeks

Charles-H. Schulz

Stefan Taxhet

Erwin Tenhumberg

Laurent Godard

Someone who has won the contest cannot win in the contest again
for the following three periods. However, the winner can, if he/she
is willing to, become a member of the selection committee for
three periods.

How will the winner be determined by the selection committee?

The number of votes that each selection committee member gets is
one third of the total number of articles in the pool in a given
month (the closest integer value). Thus, if 29 articles are
in the pool, each selection committee member gets 10 votes. Each
article can get only one vote per selection committee member, i.e.
an article cannot receive two votes from the same committe member.
At least 70% of the selection committe members must have voted.
The article with the most votes wins. If two or more articles
get the same number of votes, the article submitted first wins.
The time and date as listed in the email archives will be used
as the basis for the decision. The votes are reset to zero for
each contest period.

When will the contest start?

The first round of the contest ended on February 28. The second round started on March 1, 2006 and will end on March 31, 2006.

When will the contest end?

The contest will at least run for six months. Depending on the
success, it might get extended to twelve months.

How often will a winner be selected?

A winner will be selected for every month. The announcement
of the winner will happen in the second half of the month for
the previous month. For example, the first contest period
started on February 1 and ended on February 28 (the submission
deadline). The winner for February will be announced after
March 15, but before April 1.

When is the deadline for every contest period?

The deadline for every contest period, i.e. every month, is the
last day of the month (12am Pacific time of the first day of
the following month). Thus, for the May contest period the
last possible submission day is May 31, 2006.